Platonic love: a guide to love in modern times

The platonic love is a concept widely used today when we want to refer to a romantic longing to remain united with an unreachable person. However, the term has its origins in a very old philosophical theory that is difficult to cover with a single sentence.

Rescue some of the key ideas of what love was for Plato it can serve to remind us of a very useful lesson.

What do we understand today by platonic love?

Plato I wasn't that self-centered as if to put his name on one of his contributions to the philosophy. The term "platonic love" It was first coined by the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino, and it is very difficult that when we refer to this concept we use it with the same exactitude with which Plato used it, since both our context and our way of thinking are very different from what was usual in the Athens of more than 2000 years ago.

However, this concept is commonly used to refer to an impossible love for different reasons. It can be a reciprocated love, in which the person in love sees his attempts to get closer to someone frustrated, or it can also be used to refer to those cases in which at the moment in which someone is conquered this person stops looking perfect, so that what attracted us to them in the beginning never becomes reached.

In any case, to learn to reflect on what we experience when we fall into this type of love does not hurt to remember some of the main aspects of what love really means Platonic.

Keys to understanding platonic love

What exactly are we talking about when we refer to this kind of love? Through these four points we will try to explain it.

1. Platonic love is "true love"

For Plato, the types of love that are based on the pleasures that our senses provide us are rather banal forms of affection. Platonic love is the purest form of love because it is not based on an exchange of physical or material qualities. It is also because, in addition to being disinterested, it never lets us access what we love.

More on the different ways we humans express this feeling:

• "Types of love: what different kinds of love are there?"

2. Platonic love is never reached

According to the concept of platonic love, beauty has divine essence, and therefore can never be reached by human beings. So how is it that Plato talks about love in such positive and optimistic terms? The answer is that, for the philosopher, love prompts us to improve ourselves to be closer to the desired beauty, and this is a good thing in itself.

Ultimately, the existence of what we know today as platonic love means that there is something in us that can propel us towards self perfection. There is a paradox: we struggle to get closer to something that, by definition, is inaccessible and is infinitely far from us.

For Plato, asking questions about the nature of things through philosophy It is a clear example of what it means to look for an untold beauty. Wise people are also those who, like Socrates, seek knowledge while accepting their own ignorance. In that harmony is the ennoblement of the soul and the virtue of which Plato speaks.

3. Platonic love is universal

Platonic love does not consist of attraction towards a specific person whom we have idealized. She is, rather, a force that seeks us to find the essence of beauty in its different expressions. What matters is the divinization of beauty and goodness, concepts that for Plato are linked to each other. For this philosopher we do not fall in love with people, but with the traces of beauty that we can find in them.

That explains why, paradoxically, beauty is unattainable but also omnipresent. Plato believed that the world that we experience through the senses expresses two realities: a material one, in which she finds everything that is perceived directly through the senses, and another ideal, in which the essence of the beauty. That explains that we can find the essence of beauty in all imaginable places and people, depending on the degree to which our virtue allows us to glimpse the ideal world in the materiality that we surrounds.

Therefore, if we obey what platonic love is, to believe that a person is perfect is, in reality, to find in that person forms of expression of a beauty that does not belong directly to him or is in him exclusively. Every time we see perfection in something or someone, we are glimpsing the same thing.

4. Expresses itself intellectually

Platonic love is a type of love that, for the Greek philosopher, manifests itself in ways that are not exclusively physical, since it refers to an object of desire that is beyond the material. This is not limited to being an ethical norm of behavior on how to treat the loved one, but has to do with the very conception of what beauty is for Plato. The beautiful is inseparable from the good and the authentic, and the authentic can only be recognized through the intellect.

In the same way, the beauty that we find in a body is actually beauty that belongs to the spiritual plane. For Plato, someone who experiences this type of love yearns to spiritually access his object of desire.

Guide to love in modern times

In practically all the cases in which we talk about platonic love, there is a factor to take into account: the idealization. For Plato, love is in a balance between what is known and what is ignored, and this rule can also be applied to our relationship with people. This is because, When we idealize a person, we are perceiving him as a practically perfect being precisely because we do not know him well enough to see that it is not.

Now: if the essence of what is beautiful is unattainable, concrete people are not so. Impossible love can stop being impossible when, for one reason or another, there comes a point where we can "conquer" that person... and that allows us to know it more. Then a question appears: Is the end of impossible love the end of platonic love?

Idealize... or live love despite its bad things

Not really. For Plato, the attraction we feel for a person always goes beyond the physical, and therefore spend more time with them and discovering its different facets does not have to mean that we "tame" the essence of beauty that we find in this. There will be something in this person that will continue to be unattainable, although we will not know why, since we still do not understand and intellectually conquer what attracts us.

But this kind of persistent idealization is not the most common nowadays.

Is it your crush or just someone inaccessible to you?

Beyond what in ancient Greece was understood by platonic love, idealizing someone is used to consist in ignoring that person not because of her ability to continue to retain attractiveness no matter what. happens, but because of our difficulties to connect with her, either because we have known her recently or because she only lets us see one of her facets.

The latter is evident, for example, in the phenomenon fanboy or fangirl that world famous people have originated. Celebrities have such massive marketing machinery behind them and such efficient image consultants that we only know the most graceful and admirable part of them. To a lesser extent, The same happens with people who, despite attracting us by their appearance, never quite connect with us.

Curiously, it is the aesthetics and the material, which had less importance for Plato, which leads us to idealize our neighbor: almost never an intellectual approach. Perhaps it would be useful for us to think more often about this fact.